Sources of Light

by Margaret McMullan

  She glanced at the pictures a second time, her face looking like she was being forced to eat a bowl of lemons. She told me my captions were difficult to read and therefore "inadequate." She said I left out the state bird even though I told her I'd tried but the mockingbird wouldn't sit still long enough for me to photograph it.

  Ears brought in his jar of cicadas. They had sidetracked him altogether, and his report turned into a report about cicadas. He found out all kinds of interesting facts, like that cicadas were the only insects to have developed such an effective and specialized means of producing sound. Some species produced a noise intensity that approached the pain threshold of the human ear. Other species have songs so high in pitch that the noise was beyond the range of our hearing. Ears even brought in the Bible, which he turned open to the Book of Revelation, that part about a swarm of locusts with scorpion tails and human faces that torments the unbelievers.

  We watched Miss Jenkins's strange smile as she looked over Ears's work. "I see that you became quite interested in our plague this summer, Ears," she said. "The problem here is that the cicada has nothing to do with Mississippi. It's neither the state bug nor the state bird."

  Some people laughed when she said this. I knew that she was going to give Ears an F or make him do it all over.

  "I thought your report was real interesting," I whispered to Ears.

  He shrugged.

  When Mary Alice asked about our grades, Miss Jenkins told the class that our state report grades would come in the mail along with our final grades at Christmas.

  ***

  At lunch Ears shared food his mother had packed for the two of us, and we feasted on saltines and a can of sardines and Vienna sausages each. For dessert we split the one Moon Pie. Then Mary Alice and her friends busted up our fun wanting to play a game that involved tying Ears to the magnolia tree so that they could circle around him like they were in some powwow, but Ears and I would have none of it.

  The sun had come out and it wouldn't quit. Mary Alice had her right hand above her eyes. "What are you telling me?"

  I looked at Mary Alice standing there with her little gang of look-alikes. I didn't want to be like them or think like them to fit in anymore. "Me? I'm telling you you're acting like you're still in third grade," I said, staring her down till someone else said something about letting us losers be by ourselves.

  "What's your real name anyway?" I asked Ears after they had all gone away. "I'm sick of calling you Ears."

  "Tempe," he said. "After my great-granddaddy."

  ***

  On the last day of school before Christmas break, we spent the day spray-painting pinecones silver and gold for wreaths we made to take home to our parents as gifts, and at the end of the day we all sang the state song, which we had memorized.

  "Go, Mississippi, keep rolling along," we sang, saying "Mizippi" for Mississippi. "Go, Mississippi, you cannot go wrong."

  When school was out, Stone stood outside our classroom and walked me to my locker. I was so surprised that I couldn't think of anything to say. Ever since the dance, Stone had kept his distance from me while we were at school. People didn't even know we knew each other or liked each other. I don't even think Mary Alice knew. I wanted other people to see me talking to Stone. I wanted them to look at me and think, My, my. Look at that Samantha Thomas. She's no loser. She might just be okay. She might even be a little bit interesting. I couldn't help but notice that Stone and I were most together when we were alone. When we were with other people, we were apart. And we were most of the time with other people. I wondered if he was ashamed to be seen with me. Or was this the way things were with boys and girls? If that was so, I wanted us to be different. I wanted our separateness to change. I opened my locker to gather my books.

  "I got you a Christmas present," he said. He gave me a small wrapped box. "Open it."

  "But I didn't get you anything," I said.

  "That's not the way it works," he said. "Open it."

  Inside was a necklace with a gold cross pendant.

  "Here," he said, picking the necklace out of the box. "Let me."

  I turned around, then lifted my hair off my neck. He hooked the necklace. People watched. The bell rang. I turned around.

  "You look so pretty." Stone looked at me then, smiled, and took my hand. Stone was holding my hand, right there in school!

  "Do you have any plans for the holidays?" he asked.

  "We're going to my grandparents'," I said. "But I want to do something ... I don't know ... special. Significant."

  He laughed. "Does it involve me?"

  I shrugged and smiled. "I'm not sure you'd understand."

  "Try me."

  I thought only briefly of that old saying "Loose lips sink ships." My grandmother had told me about that silly saying they'd used during World War I to keep people from talking about where the soldiers were stationed.

  "It's something Perry's involved in, helping folks register to vote. I want to help too. So maybe my mom and I will."

  Stone's smile dropped into a frown. He let go of my hand. "You should stay out of that, Samantha. Really. That's not business of yours."

  "What are you talking about? It's all our business. You saw what happened at the drugstore, right? You were there."

  "I'm not talking about this with you, Samantha. You don't know what you're saying. It's dangerous."

  "You sound like my mother."

  "She only wants what's best for you."

  "What's best for me isn't always so important." Some people looked up. I was startled by my own voice. I slammed my locker door shut, turned, and headed home.

  CHAPTER 9

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, OUR HOUSE SHOOK US AWAKE. We heard a crash and then a car skidding off. My mother and I both dropped from our beds to the floor. We had read and heard about Molotov cocktails—homemade bombs made with gasoline in a bottle and a rag pushed down in it for a wick. At night, white boys or men in cars lit the rag and tossed these homemade bombs into yards throughout Jackson. I crawled across my room and peeked out the window. Our lawn wasn't on fire. Somebody had thrown the bomb into the yard of a preacher who lived right behind us. The previous Sunday he had been preaching for desegregation in his church. My mother came to my room and called for me to get back down and away from the windows. We huddled together on the floor in the hallway.

  "You used to tell me to sing when I was scared, remember?" I said.

  "So sing, then."

  "The farmer in the dell," I started. "The farmer in the dell. Hi-ho, the derry-o, the farmer in the dell. That's all I know."

  "The farmer takes a wife," she said, not singing. "And then: The wife takes a child."

  There on the floor, my mother put her arm over my back while we tried to sing "The Farmer in the Dell" every now and then. We stayed down on the floor like that, listening for more noise or voices or both, until we both finally fell asleep.

  ***

  My mother turned off the car. It was Christmas Day and my birthday too. The night before I was fourteen, but that morning I turned fifteen. For me, gifts weren't more plentiful on a Christmas birthday, but some years the presents were a little bit better than other years.

  We could hear nothing but the crickets my grandfather kept in his carport for fishing bait. They wouldn't quit. An hour away from where we lived, the air smelled clean and piney here in Franklin.

  "They're not always very pleasant to listen to, are they?" my mother said, flipping down the sun visor to look in the mirror. "Ready?"

  "Perry could be here," I said. "You invited him, right?"

  "He had too much work. And besides, it would be awkward."

  "He's a good guy, Mom. You're the one who used to tell me to go with your gut."

  "I invited him! He had too much work."

  "We should have dragged him along."

  My grandmother stood inside the door and waved us in, then, growing impatient, she came hurrying out of the house.

  "Maybe you and
I both need some time away," my mother said, putting on lipstick.

  "From Perry?"

  "From everything. From Jackson."

  My mother and I were both tired from the night before.

  My mother asked me not to tell my grandparents or my cousins about anything. She didn't want anyone worrying. More than anything, I think my mother wanted to get away from nights like the one we'd just had.

  My grandmother came up to the car. She opened the car door and we hugged. She smelled of perfume and Listerine both. "You're too old for this," she told me, straightening my white shirt with the Peter Pan collar. "You need a proper dress." I told her what I figured she wanted to hear: that school was great, that I had a lot of new friends, that my mother was a shoo-in for her promotion.

  Then she turned to my mother, taking her by the shoulders, standing back and looking her up and down. My mother wore a gray dress and white socks and loafers like she had worn way back when she went to graduate school. The brown leather was scuffed and they still bore the pennies my father had put in before he left for the war.

  "Martha. You should wear something else besides gray. You're too pretty for dull colors."

  "I find gray a very comforting color," my mother said.

  "Honey. It's hardly a color at all. You'll never meet a man wearing that."

  My mother shook her head, smiling.

  "You look exhausted." My grandmother would make my mother cocklebur tea, which she said cured everything. "How are you ever going to meet anyone looking so exhausted?"

  "What other mother-in-law wants her daughter-in-law to meet a man?"

  My grandmother didn't even hesitate. "Naomi wants her daughter-in-law Ruth to remarry. In the Bible. Naomi's the one who tells Ruth how to nab Boaz."

  "Maybe I have met someone already," my mother said.

  "Oh?" my grandmother said, looking back and forth between my mother and me.

  As we all went in, I made smoochy-smoochy sounds until my mother pleaded for me to stop.

  My grandmother wore her red Christmas dress and black, hard, low-heeled shoes that clicked across the hallway floor as she led us inside.

  My dad was born and raised in Franklin, Mississippi, a town off the highway that Ulysses'S. Grant himself said was too beautiful to burn. My grandparents still lived right outside Franklin, out past the counties with the forgotten Indian names.

  They lived on a house built on Choctaw land. My grandmother told me the Choctaw had been here first, long before white people. Locals claimed they heard their ghostly shouts and wails on stormy winter nights. There was barely any trace left of the Indians in Mississippi except for the names of so many rivers and towns, which I liked saying more than anything, names that felt so good zzzing around in my mouth—Yazoo, Tallahatchie, Bogue Chitoe.

  My father told me once he had loved living in Franklin but he hadn't cared for his chores. Once, while he showed me how to feed the chickens, he told me that they were terrible birds. He said that when they smelled the blood of another injured bird they would surround it and peck it to death.

  My grandparents' house was altogether different from our house in Jackson. My mother, who preferred wearing black and gray clothes, also liked a black and gray house. Inside my grandparents' old Victorian house, paintings of tulips and roses and watercolor magnolias hung on the walls next to portraits of our ancestors. At our house in Jackson, my mother hung only framed posters of European oil paintings, bought at art shows. No family pictures, not even of us.

  It was mayhem inside my grandparents' house on Christmas when we all came together for the day. First and second cousins came running to greet us, making the china and crystal in my grandmother's china cabinet rattle and chime. My mother lowered the volume on her hearing aid.

  Everything looked so old and falling-apart at my grandparents' house. Compared to the McLemores' bright, clean home, everything here in Franklin looked dirty and crumbly. The walls were a dull yellow, the color of cooked squash, and the glossy paint peeled from all the ceilings. The county water was hard, and all that sulfur made rings in the white sinks. It was terrible to use the bathroom, because now I saw the yellow ring around the tub. Only the summer before I hadn't even noticed.

  Aunt Ida came and went, slamming doors, picking fights with her oldest. She was good at that. Aunt Ida was married to my father's brother Ted.

  Uncle Ted had gone away to an Ivy League college in the East, where he got drunk his senior year and rode a horse into the administration building and up and down the stairs, allowing it to "desecrate" the marble halls. He was kicked out before graduation, and when he came home he was given a job in town at the bank, taking people's money, lending people money, and telling funny college stories over and over at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Never mind that he never graduated or got the degree.

  My grandfather waved to us while reciting Robert Burns poetry and passages from the Rubaiyat as he did a slow crawl across the swimming pool. Nobody was outside listening, so I went out to be polite. He clung to the ladder of the pool, switching to that story about driving the ice truck to the Neshoba County Fair one year. My grandfather had studied law and had his own practice in Franklin for years until he retired only recently.

  "You have a good swim?" I asked him when he came out of the pool.

  "Oh, yeah," he said, not even smiling. "I got wet."

  He put a towel around himself and hugged me. Then my grandfather, who was mostly annoyed that so many people were in his house, disappeared into his bedroom and slept until someone called him in for supper.

  We waited for everyone to arrive before we opened presents. Another batch of cousins drove up in a paneled station wagon, its back end scraping the concrete as they pulled into the drive. They were still singing some road song as they all piled out, brushing their hair, putting stuff on their eyelids, and carrying purses they didn't even need.

  My mother grew quiet whenever she visited Franklin. Maybe it was because there was so much noise there. Or maybe she didn't say much because my grandmother, without saying very much herself, seemed to have everything under control—the food, the house, the family. Even though my mother and my grandmother didn't get along all the time, they were a lot alike.

  It was so loud when we all came together in that house. All those voices just made me want to climb into myself. I couldn't get outside fast enough to join the pack of cousins listening to the radio out on the porch.

  Aunt Ida wouldn't let us listen to the new Elvis. She was still seething over Elvis doing a slow bump and grind on national TV at the end of "Hound Dog" on The Milton Berle Show a gazillion years ago. She said Elvis's obscene and offensive gyrating was an outrage and could only lead to teenage delinquency.

  There were seven of us cousins who lived nearby now. I was no longer considered a 100 percent Yankee. It was more like 40 percent now. We only had one cousin who was a full-fledged Yankee, an older boy who we once saw swing a cat in circles by its tail. His mother was my father's sister Irene, named after my grandmother's mother. She had married a man up in Chicago. We hardly ever saw Aunt Irene.

  "George Wallace has it right," Aunt Ida said. "Integration is gonna ruin this country."

  I looked up and saw my mother turn her hearing aid completely off.

  "He's a noted lawyer," Aunt Ida said of some relative living in Tupelo.

  "A noted lawyer," my grandmother said, laughing, coming out with boiled shrimp. "Oh, for goodness' sake. What's gotten into this family? You'd think we'd dropped from heaven itself instead of working this land with our bare hands."

  Us cousins grew bored with all the talk, and while my grandmother cooked in the kitchen and the rest of the grownups sat and talked about world politics, we set out to play capture-the-flag. I overheard my mother on the front porch gushing about the United Nations—how hopeful it was, how tolerant we all would become.

  We played out back where my grandmother kept her kitchen garden. They grew all their own vegetables and herbs, and h
ere and there were still eggplant, basil, hollyhocks, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, all kinds of greens, and clumps of crepe myrtle leading to the family cemetery. This is where my great-grandfather and great-grandmother Frank and Irene Russell lay buried. They died a week apart when they were both in their eighties. They lay next to the oldest grave, which belonged to my great-great-great-grandmother who died in the winter of 1862, the very same day my great-aunt Little Bit was born. Great-Aunt Little Bit was birthed by a Union soldier and swaddled in his Union shirt. That was a good story my grandmother told. Next to her lay my great-uncle Jack and their parents.

  My grandmother, Thelma Addy, often told stories about her father, Frank Russell. Sometimes it felt like it might as well have been 1862 and not 1962. Sometimes, though, my grandmother told us about her own raising. She was born while the whole South was still trying to recover from the Civil War, and she told stories of a place called No-Bob, where a woman named Addy O'Donnell grew up and then went on to save my grandmother's life by curing her of thrush when she was a baby.

  We had been farmers. That much was clear. Now we were lawyers, bankers, teachers, and housewives. Everybody here was supposed to know exactly where he or she came from, and we were to make sure that others knew it as well. Anybody else from any other family? Most likely, they'd come in on the second landing in 1742, whereas we had come in on the first.

  We passed our hands through my grandmother's herbs, rubbing the rosemary and mint with our fingertips, knowing we would still have the smell on our hands late into the night. Some of the older cousins walked out into the woods to fish in our grandparents' pond. The woods bordered the black section of town, which Sherman had given to the newly freed slaves one hundred years ago.

  I could hear the grownup voices still talking, coming through the screen door, sounding like a low, ongoing, cicada-like hum.

  We captured the flag and went on to play war. None of us was too old for war. In fact, we older cousins made our pinecone artillery more powerful, more grenade-like, because we knew how exactly to pretend to bite off the top before throwing, and we knew how to mimic the sounds of explosions. I thought of my dad during our war games. I felt I became my dad. All of us grew up hearing stories about war and warring. Soldiers kept their mouths open when they fired off their cannons and guns, to release the pressure. Still, most of them lost their hearing anyway. We never grew tired of this game, and sometimes we quietly dared each other to make the fighting ever more real.